The present invention relates to the field of slideshow presentations, more particularly, to using a menu slideshow framework for generating an organized menu-driven slideshow containing definable content.
Slideshows permit a presentation of a series of images and media, which is often done for artistic or instructional purposes. Traditionally, slideshows were presented using a slide projector or overhead projector, but in more recent times, slideshows have become more widely used on a computer running presentation software. These computerized slideshows are often more dynamic than their less sophisticated counterparts, which provides a myriad of new interactive opportunities and dynamic presentation options.
Often, presenters of flash content want finer grained control on the configuration and interactivity of a flash based (e.g., ADOBE FLASH) presentation than is possible using existing solutions. For example, a flash presentation can represent a graphical user interface (GUI) of a software prototype, within which a user can select flash buttons, menus, toolbars, and the like. Interactive flash presentations are not limited to software prototypes but can be used in any context, such as showing an interactive manufacturing process, a decomposable product, and the like. For these purposes, a user often wants to display configurable and selectable menus, inclusive with pop-ups.
At present, to implement a menu-driven slideshow in a multimedia toolset such as ADOBE FLASH, a user would have to first create code to create and manage the slideshow's menus, including writing code for each individual action. This can be quite time consuming and require a certain level of expertise in using FLASH. Because of the amount and level of code required, it is common to “hard-code,” or set configurable options at the code level. Hard-coding can reduce required coding, but will limit the re-usability of the code used for the slideshow. In the event that the code was re-used, additional time would be required to change the options that were hard-coded. Further, current practices limit an accessibility of configurable menus to a user population having code-level flash manipulation tools and having at least a moderate level in coding flash content, which places custom menuing of slideshows beyond a competency level of many potential users.